Please note: we have been online over ten years, and we want The Trek BBS to continue as a free site. But if you block our ads we are at risk.Please consider unblocking ads for this site - every ad you view counts and helps us pay for the bandwidth that you are using. Thank you for your understanding.

Welcome! The Trek BBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans. Please login to see our full range of forums as well as the ability to send and receive private messages, track your favourite topics and of course join in the discussions.

If you are a new visitor, join us for free. If you are an existing member please login below. Note: for members who joined under our old messageboard system, please login with your display name not your login name.

Nice that the mods here can act like assholes. Do you get a trolling warning for that?^

No, because what I said was directed at the content of your post rather than at you personally, and was in direct reaction to something you said rather than out of the blue and unprovoked.

__________________'First Contact' is the tale of a man who just wants to cash in on his creation so he can get wasted on an island full of naked women, but his fans keep insisting that he's a saintly visionary who has profoundly altered the world. AKA - 'I Don't Want to be a Statue: The Gene Roddenberry Story.'

The cops missed. The lock down didn't work, he was hiding in the boat outside the lockdown area. Once the martial law was lifted and people went out is when someone saw the blood and called.

"Lock down didn't work". Really? Think again.

NOBODY ELSE DIED. Suspect apprehended. It certainly did some good. The lock down kept the suspect "locked down" where he was, even if just outside the "official perimeter"... he couldn't go anywhere far and with all the bleeding was getting weaker by the hour, hiding out until he couldn't stay hidden longer. He probably would have died in the boat if he hadn't been tracked down, he was so out of it.

So what if a civilian found traces of blood that led to the suspect? The police asked citizens to be vigilant and keep an eye out. They did. They helped.

Yeah, it's easy to sit back in your comfy chair and cite how this was an unreasonable form of marital law, but had they not done this and the suspect managed to kill more people... what then? So people were inconvenienced. Most people would agree that being safe is far worth the trade-off of inconvenience.

All this is just silly. You're always going to have the knee-jerk anti-law enforcement types trying to sound cool. In Massachusetts, we are merciless to our cops and officials when they screw up, but we give them props when they do things right. This was an unprecedented situation and all the agencies did a beautiful job and so did the civilians. I'm sure somebody somewhere is kicking his or herself for not extending the perimeter another block, but hindsight is always 20/20.

lurok wrote:

I thought this was great tribute:

That's fantastic.

arch101 wrote:

I know what you mean. White Hat was captured 4 miles from my house in Waltham.

That is pretty scary.

Locutus of Bored wrote:

Talking to Wolf Blitzer (who really should be the terrorist with that Die Hard villain name) he said he'd be fine with writing an article (and as Tora Ziyal posted he already did), but that he wouldn't write a novelization because he's too close to it and "it's not really his style" (his words).

I didn't even know he had been interviewed. I'll have to check YouTube. I can certainly understand how he would feel too close to it, but it's interesting that he doesn't consider it his style.

I wonder if the writings of Alisa Ganieva might give some clue as to motive. From the wiki:

"She moved with her family to Dagestan and attended school in Makhachkala...Her debut novel "Salaam, Dalgat!" describes the everyday life of Dagestani youth in the cities and shows the decay of traditional life...

Here was a statement from the Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov--made on Instagram before the younger brother was caught:

"Tragic events happened in Boston. As a result of a
terrorist attack, people were killed. We already expressed our
condolences to the residents of the city and to the people of America.
Today, as the media report, a certain Tsarnaev was killed during a
detention attempt. It would be logical if he was detained and an
investigation was conducted, all the circumstances and degree of his
guilt explained. Apparently, the special forces needed a result at any
price to calm society." Debunked

In the link above there is the official criminal complaint, in the second page in point 3, it clearly says that Dzhokhar used a WMD against persons and property.

Now I've done some checking and a WMD is a weapon which belong to the CBRNE class (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives (high yield)). But does a home-made pressure cooker bomb count as a high yield explosive? We're not talking about weapons which produce dozens or hundreds of casualties, but thousands or tens of thousands of casualties or higher.

This is blatant fear-mongering and sensationalism to plant the idea that a WMD was used in the Boston terror attacks. Those were terrible attacks but since when have IEDS been considered WMDs?

In the link above there is the official criminal complaint, in the second page in point 3, it clearly says that Dzhokhar used a WMD against persons and property.

Now I've done some checking and a WMD is a weapon which belong to the CBRNE class (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosives (high yield)). But does a home-made pressure cooker bomb count as a high yield explosive? We're not talking about weapons which produce dozens or hundreds of casualties, but thousands or tens of thousands of casualties or higher.

This is blatant fear-mongering and sensationalism to plant the idea that a WMD was used in the Boston terror attacks. Those were terrible attacks but since when have IEDS been considered WMDs?

There's something very rotten going on here...

It's certainly a sensationalist use of terminology, and I find calling it a WMD ridiculous, but there's no intent to fool anyone into thinking this was a nuclear/biological/chemical attack or that the bomb was more powerful than it was. The public is abundantly clear at this point on what kind of weapon was used and the scope of its damage thanks to the nonstop media coverage this past week.

However, you've now moved on from your previous baseless conspiracy theories about the brothers possibly being framed to trying to insinuate that a poor choice of words indicates some kind of grand scheme to fool the public or cover something up. Just give it up already. It's really coming off as foolish at this point.

Mr. Laser Beam wrote:

Seems pretty clear to me. Bombs are a weapon. They are intended to cause mass destruction. Therefore they are a weapon of mass destruction. What part of this is unclear?

Because the meaning of the term weapons of mass destruction is well established as primarily concerning N/B/C weapons and not low yield IEDs. The fact that they caused a lot of damage and chaos doesn't change how the term has traditionally been used. When that elderly man plowed through the Santa Monica Farmer's Market in his car killing ten and injuring 63 they didn't start calling his car a weapon of mass destruction (though I'll grant it's not designed to be a weapon, unlike an IED, but that's still not how we've used the term WMDs).

__________________'First Contact' is the tale of a man who just wants to cash in on his creation so he can get wasted on an island full of naked women, but his fans keep insisting that he's a saintly visionary who has profoundly altered the world. AKA - 'I Don't Want to be a Statue: The Gene Roddenberry Story.'

Seems pretty clear to me. Bombs are a weapon. They are intended to cause mass destruction. Therefore they are a weapon of mass destruction. What part of this is unclear?

It's a deliberate misinterpretation which the US media will bandy about until everyone starts believing that Boston was attacked with a WMD. It implies that suicide bombers and car bombers (and all those bombings you hear about in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere) have been setting off not just explosives but 'WMDs'.

I mean when you think of a WMD, you think of deadly toxins, nerve gas, nuclear weapons and now... pressure cooker bombs? Just how far do extend the definition of a WMD? C4, Semtex, grenades or even guns? After all guns have killed just as many, if not more, people as explosives have. Where do you draw the line? Maybe the Second Amendment should read like this-

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear weapons of mass destruction shall not be infringed.

Anyway I'm side-tracking here, so my point is this. Terrorism is one incredibly sensitive and polarizing subject in the US, saying that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev detonated a WMD will only make things worse and will only give the US government more leverage to expand its anti-terror laws. Already the House of Representatives has passed CISPA (and after the Boston attack it was all everyone could talk about, so there was no chance for an online petition to form), and the Senate will soon vote upon it, so already US politicians are taking advantage of this terrorist attack.

The attack on the Boston Marathon was a terrible thing, but saying that a WMD went off is a misrepresentation of what happened. I'm saying let's stick to the facts here; two pressure cook bombs (IEDs) were detonated (while five more explosive devices were diffused) and saying that these IEDs were WMDs is misconstruing the truth.

Already the House of Representatives has passed CISPA (and after the Boston attack it was all everyone could talk about, so there was no chance for an online petition to form), and the Senate will soon vote upon it, so already US politicians are taking advantage of this terrorist attack.

The House passed a more comprehensive version of it last year too, without any terror attack to "take advantage of," and it died in the Senate. Between the Democratically-controlled Senate and President Obama's threat to veto it, it might just die this time too, even in its revised form.

If your goal is to challenge sensationalistic rhetoric, you're going about it in entirely the wrong way by imagining that everything is interconnected and part of some elaborate plot. The CISPA vote would likely have proceeded the same way regardless if there had been an attack in Boston or not.

__________________'First Contact' is the tale of a man who just wants to cash in on his creation so he can get wasted on an island full of naked women, but his fans keep insisting that he's a saintly visionary who has profoundly altered the world. AKA - 'I Don't Want to be a Statue: The Gene Roddenberry Story.'